Threats, Likes, Data-gate: What internal Facebook documents reveal

The UK Parliament’s digital, culture, media, and sport (DCMS) Committee was looking at Facebook’s internal documents with respect to Cambridge Analytica. These documents were filed in a US court, in an ongoing legal dispute between Facebook and a startup called Six4Three, which initiated the lawsuit. Six4Three alleged that Facebook defrauded developers by enticing them to create apps on the platform by implying that in return, they would get long term access to users’ data, including friends’ data.

Zuckerberg would have liked to charge developers for access to user data, but Facebook did not execute this

An update to the Facebook Android app would collect user call logs, and Facebook tried hard to hide this from its users

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO and co-founder, put out a post on Facebook which, naturally, said that the DCMS’ data dump was “out of context.”

Zuckerberg said:

“In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access… like the quiz app that sold data to Cambridge Analytica — could no longer operate on our platform.”

Then, these app developers sued Facebook to get more access to people’s data

While preventing “abusive apps” being present on the platform, Facebook faced the challenge of “making it economically sustainable as we transitioned from desktop to mobile.”

“Ultimately, we decided on a model where we continued to provide the developer platform for free and developers could choose to buy ads if they wanted.”

“To be clear, that’s different from selling people’s data. We’ve never sold anyone’s data.”